Wednesday, November 05, 2003

The Revolution Will Not Be Analyzed

Praise J.Hoberman: He's written an enlightening review of the new Matrix film that hails its pyrotechnic grandeur and Biblical scope over its supposed metaphysical insights, and he's managed to do so without referencing one critical theorist! (P.S. If you are a film reviewer and you've used the phrases "Baudrillard he ain't" or "Desert of the Real" once in the past year, please dig your frontal lobes out with a spoon and flash back to the overpriced graduate school seminar from which you draw your context. Whoops, I forgot: there is no spoon. SO USE A FUCKING A FORK.)

Instead, he addresses the writer whose stylistic traces appear all over the science fiction and fantasy of the last 50 years, but who is not very often credited as such: my idol, William Burroughs

"There's a hint of Burroughsian grandeur to this cyborg-against-cyborg ballet mécanique and, at this point too, my notes began to resemble an undergraduate Burroughs imitation: BX cable squid spaghetti static electricity! Machine-gun machine-hell Armageddon!! Infernal orange and blue orgone-light tentacle vortex!!! This battle, which seems to last the better part of an hour, is absolutely gorgeous, even before Niobe's spaceship barrels into the force field of total abstraction."

Go team! Oh man, I'm going to have a giggly orgasm when I see this thing. I hope it ends with Zion actually being a simulation inside a pretentious graduate theory seminar! And Keanu Reaves will break his pencil after scratching his chin in contemplation with it. Then he'll try to sharpen it, but whoa: THERE IS NO PENCIL. ROLL CREDITS.

Actually, I was hoping they complete the anime-vibe of the giant, hulking robotech beasts lumbering in the previews and have Yu Gi Yo appear with children's cards or something. That would be something.